In theory, you could do SEO without measuring and reporting, but a solid grasp of analytics is essential to success. SEO analytics covers a wide range of topics, but often focuses on performance metrics around traffic, keywords, URLs, page speed, conversion rates, and more.
Beyond performance metrics, research metrics present another focal point of SEO analytics. This includes topics like keyword analysis, backlink research, and other areas to inform your SEO strategy.
Here, you can browse our top resources on SEO analytics, as well as find the most recent blog posts on the subject below.
SEO Analytics and Reporting : Check out our free SEO Learning Center where we've collected the top resources on analytics and reporting.
The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics : The most popular website analytics platform in the world, Google Analytics is a must-know platform for all SEOs.
A Beginner's Guide to Google Search Console : A companion to any web analytics platform, Google Search Console offers a wealth of SEO information to webmasters.
When and How to Use Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Link Count Metrics : SEO metrics have a special place in analytics. Rand Fishkin shows you how to use these popular metrics correctly.
The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics : This article covers a very specific niche topic, but also an important one! Learn why that direct traffic in your analytics platform isn't what you think it is.
We have been using Google Analytics for over a year now and I admit there is lots of stuff that I have squint my eyes at and ask myself how it could possibly make sense. Lots of stuff, that is, except the greatest little trick in the world that I have been using for about the same amount of time. Google Analytics has a parameter tag known as UTM. Sorry, couldn’t tell you what it stands fo...
As a special pre-holiday treat, we decided to share our more long tail search terms from last month (November 2007). Enjoy!
Dear Blog Readers, SEO optimizers and Fellow Marketing Professionals, I am a relative noob at blogging and SEO, but that didn’t stop me from getting a new job building my company’s website, setting up our corporate blog (www.gwebs.com/cryptographer) and commandeering a 21 inch flat-screen monitor from my boss...
Way back in November of last year, I suggested a linkbait idea to the wide community on a comparison of the major analytics vendors. Despite an incredible amount of work and effort required to put it together, Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting prevailed and produced the incredibly valuable, must read research report...
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Feed tracking is hard. Jeff explains why, and how Feedburner manages to make it work.
Way back in November of last year, I asked if there was some worthy soul out amongst the Internet Marketing world who would take on the monstrous task of gathering truly comparable data from the major analytics providers simultaneously, side-by-side, on several websites and publishing the findings. Well... Ask &...
I've had more than a few people tell me they really missed our old advertising page, not because we sold any ads, but because our monthly traffic, search and referral stats were always there and relatively frequently updated. As consolation (and since I always did intend to keep SEOmoz's stats as public as possible), here's an exhaustive roundup of important analytics data (from Indextools) for...
One-half of my formal education is marketing, not advertising, marketing -- number crunching, customer segmentation marketing. I've lost c...
I had a chance to be part of a ClickTracks class a few weeks ago today called, "ClickTracks KISWA (Keep It Simple Web Analyst)" by Avinash Kaushik. Avinash compared the theme of this web analytic call to Occam's razor: "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one". I think with all the options with ClickTracks and other tools out no...
With the wind chill factor at –2 degrees in New York on Tuesday, 3/6/07, I attended an awesome seminar at the New York Hilton, “The New Age of Web 2.0 Marketing,” presented by ClickZ and sponsored by Unica. It was free, and it was great! I used to think that there were two main parts to a successful website: web design/development/usability and SEO/M. ...
At SEOmoz, our biggest goal is to convert readers into regular visitors. Luckily, through our Indextools tracking software, we're able to see exactly where our signups come from and what search terms and referring domains tend to bring the highest converting traffic. Here's a couple quick examples: ...
Last Friday, I released a piece of linkbait for Drivl that I had been working on for the past few weeks. It was Every Single Mythbusters Myth EVER on One Page, and I was pretty proud of it. I'm a bit of a fan, so this was totally a labor of love.As with any linkbait, I was watching the referal logs like a hawk. I submitted the ...
At the beginning of October Rand and I launched 25 ad campaigns on Google AdWords. We chose keywords that got a fair amount of searches each month but were by no means popular so that we'd be able to bid on them for dirt cheap; hence, we bid on words like "Punnett square," "snark," Venn diagram," and "uvula." Our goal for this experiment was to see ho...
Last week, during the Vintage Tub & Bath Dinner, Hitwise won a link from the SEOmoz blog. But, in typical Rand fashion, I decided that rather than simply point a bit of traffic their way, I'd do a real, constructive, signally post using some Hitwise data. Below, I've looked at several commercial sectors on the web that have recently seen entrance...